[binarycrusader]

Totally agree; other inaccuracies are:

"However, the Linux incarnation of OSS was a particularly simplicistic one which only supported one sound channel at the same time and only very rudimentary mixing."

That's incorrect. The sound channel limitation depended on the hardware you had installed. So did the mixing capabilities. If the hardware supported it, OSS exposed the additional capabilities.

Those of us with SoundBlaster cards remember very well why we looked using them on Linux (because, unlike most cards, they supported multiple applications outputting audio simultaneously).

[wink]

Despite all the incorrect or misleading facts (you spotted quite a few more than I did) I can totally relate to what I think was the author's intention in writing it:

Magic.

Modern linux distributions are doing many things in a way that is, at best, surprising and, at worst, undebuggable.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" comes to mind quickly.

Working with Linux in the 90s was surely not as easy as it is today, and probably for the better. But I also find myself longing for the old days at times. Examples are lack of NetworkManager (like lack of Bridge support in the version on my laptop, no clue if it's been fixed upstream, I'm using distro packages) or certain hald/dbus automagic things. And no, I won't go into details and that can be held against me, but there frustrations and annoyances - surely partly to be blamed onto me and partly to the software. Coming from that, I feel with the author.

Then again I'm also glad I don't have to wade knee-deep into config files every time I want to change something. :)

[hp]

yeah, it's a tradeoff. If the software does more, then the software is more complex... OK, but, sometimes it's nice that it does more. People are used to other systems (iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS) and those are setting the bar pretty high. They are all extremely complex systems that do a lot.

Everyone wants a simple system... as long as it has just this one thing that they need... and this one other thing...

This author seems to feel there was some way in which the software could do everything it does and there would be no downsides... you know, here and there in some detail it's probably true that the tradeoff is wrong. But that's just saying "all software could be better" or "all software has bugs" or something - true, but not an actionable insight.

I get the guy's frustration. But you know, there's no need to wrap the emotion up in non-factual hypotheses about source code that one is not familiar with.

Software sucks. We all know it. Using your imagination to diagnose why isn't going to get anyone anywhere ;-)

There probably are some improvements possible if we all go look at the source and get the real info.

[lmm]

That's a nitpick really. Every major OS from windows 95 onwards (BSD included) could/can do software mixing on cards that didn't have hardware mixing, except for linux/OSS.

[binarycrusader]

And that was only true if you were using the version of OSS included in Linux.

The commercial version of OSS supported software-based mixing when the hardware didn't support it.

Same as the version of OSS found in Solaris today.